54 for the south pier, in San Francisco, was a good deal less promising. The south pier had to stand, in water, on sinuous, slippery serpentine, the state rock. Also under the ocean, two miles away, was the San Andreas Fault. The serpentine was thought to be potentially unstable, so it was hollowed out, like a rotten molar. The hollow was a little more than an acre, and ten stories deep. It was to be filled with concrete to anchor the bridge While it still lay open and dry, within coffering walls thirty feet thick, the structural geologist Andrew Lawson, of Berke- ley, was lowered in a bucket to inspect the surface of the bedrock. With his pure-white hair, his large frame, his tetragrammatonic mustache, Lawson personified Higher Authority. The sta- bility of the serpentine had been called into question and made a public issue not only by a mining engineer but by the world-renowned structural geolo- gist Bailey Willis, of Stanford, who predicted disaster. Lawson regarded Willis's assessment as "pure buncomb." Getting out of his bucket a hundred and seven feet below the strait, Lawson found that "the rock of the entire area is compact, strong serpentine remark- ably free from seams of any kind." He wrote in his report, "When struck with a hammer, it rings like steeL" About the proximity of the great fault Lawson had realistically observed (during the design phase) that an earthquake strong enough to knock down the bridge would also raze the city. He went on to say, "Though it faces possible destruction, San Fran- cisco does not stop growing and that growth necessarily involves the erec- tion of large and expensive structures." InJune, 1935, when the south tower stood nearly complete-seven hundred and forty-seven feet high, with no cables attached-it began to sway in a middle-energy earthquake. A construc- tion worker named Frenchy Gales continues the story: It was so limber the tower swayed sixteen feet each way. . . . There were twelve or thir- teen guys on top, with no way to get down The elevator wouldn't run. The whole thing would sway toward the ocean, guys would say, "Here we go!" Then it would sway back, toward the Bay. Guys were laying on the deck, throwing up and everything. I figured if we go in, the iron would hit the water. The iron did not hit the water. SEPTEMBER 21, 1992 Charles Ellis, the chief designer, had likened his developing bridge to a hammock strung between redwoods. Addressing the National Academy of Sciences in 1929, he said, "If I knew that there was to be an earthquake in San Francisco and. . . this bridge were built at that time, I would hie me to the center of it, and while watching the sun sink into China across the Pacific I would feel content with the thought that in case of an earthquake I had chosen the safest spot in which to be." Moores and I recross the bridge. South of the south pier, we go down a steep trail to the Pacific beach that comes up from Point Lobos. There are serpentine outcrops above the beach- large blocky hunks in the scaly Fran- ciscan matrix. The closer we come to the pier of the bridge the more serpen- tine we see. "It could be part of the basement of the Marin Headlands Ter- " M " Th rane, oores says. e seamount, with this serpentine as a basement, is a really far-travelled piece. It's old and equatorial. It began life way out in the central ocean. What a pile of hash- mash to put a bridge on!" The serpen- tine is massive, soft and soapy, threaded 1992 Ameflcan Express Travel Related Serv1cesCompany Jne Þ- ... YOU ARE HERE " ' .,ow; J\.. .. " t, Introducin g a Travelers Che g ue for cou les